Phenomenal World

"A DOLL POSSESSED BY A DEMON"

Recommender systems power YouTube's controversial kids' videos

Familiar cartoon characters are placed in bizarre scenarios, sometimes by human content creators, sometimes by automated systems, for the purpose of attracting views and ad money. First, from the New York Times:

“But the app [YouTube Kids] contains dark corners, too, as videos that are disturbing for children slip past its filters, either by mistake or because bad actors have found ways to fool the YouTube Kids algorithms.

“In recent months, parents like Ms. Burns have complained that their children have been shown videos with well-known characters in violent or lewd situations and other clips with disturbing imagery, sometimes set to nursery rhymes. Many have taken to Facebook to warn others, and share video screenshots showing moments ranging from a Claymation Spider-Man urinating on Elsa of ‘Frozen’ to Nick Jr. characters in a strip club.”

On Medium, JAMES BRIDLE expands on the topic, and criticizes the structure of YouTube itself for incentivizing these kinds of videos, many of which have millions of views.

“These videos, wherever they are made, however they come to be made, and whatever their conscious intention (i.e. to accumulate ad revenue) are feeding upon a system which was consciously intended to show videos to children for profit. The unconsciously-generated, emergent outcomes of that are all over the place.

…

“While it is tempting to dismiss the wilder examples as trolling, of which a significant number certainly are, that fails to account for the sheer volume of content weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on.”

FEED FEEDBACK

Tufekci: “…Facebook does not ask people what they want, in the moment or any other way. It sets up structures, incentives, metrics & runs with it.”

Mosseri: “We actually ask 10s of thousands of people a day how much they want to see specific stories in the News Feed, in addition to other things.”

Tufekci: “That’s not asking your users, that’s research on your product. Imagine a Facebook whose customers are users—you’d do so much differently. I mean asking all people, in deliberate fashion, with sensible defaults—there are always defaults—even giving them choices they can change…Think of the targeting offered to advertisers—with support to make them more effective—and flip the possibilities, with users as customers. The users are offered very little in comparison. The metrics are mostly momentary and implicit. That’s a recipe to play to impulse.”

The tweets are originally from Zeynep Tufekci in response to Benedict Evans (link), but the conversation is much easier to read in Hamza Shaban’s screenshots here.

See the end of this newsletter for an extended comment from Jay.

On looping effects (paywall): “This chapter argues that today's understanding of causal processes in human affairs relies crucially on concepts of ‘human kinds’ which are a product of the modern social sciences, with their concern for classification, quantification, and intervention. Child abuse, homosexuality, teenage pregnancy, and multiple personality are examples of such recently established human kinds. What distinguishes human kinds from ‘natural kinds’, is that they have specific ‘looping effects’. By coming into existence through social scientists' classifications, human kinds change the people thus classified.” Link. ht Jay

THE MESO-LEVEL

Mechanisms and causes between micro and macro

“It is fairly well accepted that there are social mechanisms underlying various patterns of the social world — free-rider problems, communications networks, etc. But the examples that come readily to mind are generally specified at the level of individuals. The new institutionalists, for example, describe numerous social mechanisms that explain social outcomes; but these mechanisms typically have to do with the actions that purposive individuals take within a given set of rules and incentives.

“The question here is whether we can also make sense of the notion of a mechanism that takes place at the social level. Are there meso-level social mechanisms? (As always, it is acknowledged that social stuff depends on the actions of the actors.)”

In the post, Little defines a causal mechanism and a meso-level mechanism, then offers example research.

“…It is possible to identify a raft of social explanations in sociology that represent causal assertions of social mechanisms linking one meso-level condition to another. Here are a few examples: